LitHub Daily: December 2, 2015

TODAY: In 1867, Charles Dickens gives his first public reading in the United States. 

• The joy of writing about Bob Ross—creator of worlds, master of happy accidents—and his iconic PBS show, The Joy of Painting. | Literary Hub
• Part two of Edwidge Danticat’s conversation with Paul Holdengraber: on death, Haiti, and silver linings. | Literary Hub
• Before the Best Of book lists have their way: an anticipatory list of books coming out in December. | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
• Talking with a cultural Sasquatch: Edmund de Waal discusses the “investigation-travelogue-memoir-history of his lifelong experiences with porcelain.” | Hazlitt
• Exceeding language and making an art of the everyday: An interview with Ivan Vladislavić. | 3:AM Magazine
• “The wounds inflicted on [her characters]… are nothing compared to those inflicted by Yanagihara herself,” vs. “it is a challenging and demanding book that asks a lot of its readers in respect to stamina and facing up to some ugly (imagined) facts:” A Little Life drama, live. | NYRB
• “Did he teach us anything about writing? No, not really.” Susan Taylor Chehak interviews her former teacher, John Irving. | Guernica
• “We have the stone, the paper, and then, indeed, the violence.” Naja Marie Aidt discusses brotherly and sisterly cunning, the land of guilt and shame, and shamanism. | BOMB Magazine
• Thoughts on T. Geronimo Johnson’s Welcome to Braggsville, which range from Prep to Absalom, Absalom! | Public Books
• In which Jonathan Franzen describes the preparation for his colonoscopy. | Publishing Perspectives

Also on Literary Hub: Where do book titles come from? · From the Black avant-garde to East Hampton: a conversation with poet Dawn Lundy Martin · The singular Libbie Custer, from T. J. Stiles’s Custer’s Trials

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